I've been playing with it, and it seems to be a really cool device,
barring a few issues. It feels very solid, and I like that. What I
dislike is the software.

Don't get me wrong - I love PalmOS, but PalmOS 5 is trying to do things
it's just not capable of and Graffiti 2 makes me want to throw my shiny
new toy into a wall. For example, the hack that the PalmOS guys are
using for showing focus selection? It breaks with at least half of the
color themes that they ship on the device, because it doesn't draw the
halo properly on the buttons. And the fact that I can't create my
*own* color theme annoys me, too.

I need to figure out some way to get Graffiti 1 working on this
thing. I'm using a demo version of TealScript for now but it's a little
on the slow side and I don't really like the idea of paying \$30 for it,
especially since it's *not* a faithful reproduction.

Sync works great over Bluetooth to my Mac mini, which is pleasing. The
pilot-xfer command-line utilities on Linux seem to work very well too,
which is good; I haven't tried any other utilities yet, but I will soon.

I blogged last month about switching my phone to Vonage, which has gone
swimmingly well. I'm really happy with Vonage, in that I haven't had to
deal with them at all because their product just works (which is so rare
in our industry that it's scary, and I'm sad that I even find it
noticeable that I'm commenting on it), and also in that the features
they provide seem to work really well. Being able to check my voicemail
from the web is totally badass.

That said, since I no longer have a cell phone to keep my address book
on, I decided to pick up a Palm once more. After checking out a few
models and consulting with coworkers, I decided to pick up the Tungsten
E2.

I put my order in on Tuesday, December 6th, and I made sure to select
'Overnight shipping' because I'm an impatient bastard and I want it
now. I would've gone into a store to buy it, but it came with a free
128MB MMC flash card when I bought it online from Palm, and like a
sucker, I decided to go for the freebie.

(I also noticed, just after submitting my order, that Amazon was selling
the same exact handheld, sans the 128MB flash card, for \$150. D'oh.)

I just got a mail from Palm, today, informing me that my order has
been shipped.

I won't have it until Monday; even if UPS does deliver it tomorrow, I
had it scheduled for an office delivery since I expected to be at work,
and I'm not planning on going in to the office tomorrow.

In other words, by the time I get it, it will have been almost a week
since I placed the order. With "Overnight" shipping.

I decided that I was sick of paying too much money for my cell phone and
so I've initiated a transfer of my cell phone number from Sprint/Nextel
to Vonage.

Vonage assigned me a temporary number in the meanwhile, which is cool,
and I've been playing with the service.

I have to say that I'm really pleased with it so far.

Installation was literally a snap - I unpacked the router they sent me
(the Linksys RTP300), plugged in the power, and scratched my head over
what I should do next. I figured that I'd probably have to do some port
forwarding magic or something if I wanted it to work from behind the
router, so I punted on that and went to Target to pick up a handset
since I haven't ever owned a "real" phone.

Bought a \$9 handset at Target, a GE "Slimline" thing that has call
waiting, caller ID, three-way calling, and other things that are insane
for a \$9 phone. Anyway. I brought it back home, plugged it (and the
ethernet cable) into my RTP300, and then mentally prepared myself for
the frustration of having to do magic to get my main router to let the
new toy do its thing.

I was a little disappointed, actually.

It just worked. No port forwarding, no iptables hackery, no headaches,
no frustration - the lights flickered in a few weird patterns for a
minute or so, and then I picked up the handset and I got a dial tone. I
dialed my phone number and it asked me to log in to my voicemail.

Consider me impressed. Not to mention that the web-based UI for managing
the Vonage account is really really sweet - I have it set to send me
email when I get a new voicemail, and you can check your voicemails from
the web (they show up as WAV files), plus it's dead simple to set up
call forwarding and configure the different timeouts for voicemail/call
forwarding/etc.

So, I don't know about the other routers - I've read lots of nightmare
story reports from people using other hardware and things - or other
phones or other VoIP providers, but so far I'm pretty damned impressed
with Vonage. Oh, and for \$25/month, I get unlimited calls to anywhere
in North America, including Canada, and their international rates are
pretty good, too. I called daniels up the other day and the
conversation - which lasted for almost an hour - cost less than a combo
meal at Burger King.

For those of you who are syndicated on Planet KDE and also care about
your bandwidth: Please pay attention to this message.

By default, Planet KDE will now show any images that you include in your
blog. If you do not wish for images from your blog to show up on the
Planet (which I can understand, since we do use up quite a bit of
bandwidth), now you just have to do:

The old class="showonplanet" is still around, but it's irrelevant now
and may be removed in the future.

[@ajax] i have found the greatest flash game ever@ajax[]
[@daniels] 595ft
[@daniels] hm, 928ft
[@ajax] 1144ft is my record so far
[@daniels] now 1022
[@ajax] i'm pretty sure that if launching kittens out of cannons is
wrong i don't want to be right

Today is a pretty cool day for me because a project I've been working on
at work is finally released.

[][]

dogtail is a framework written in Python which makes it easy to write
scripts to automate graphical applications. It uses AT-SPI which means
that (for now) it doesn't work with KDE, but I fought the good fight to
make sure that it has no GNOME dependencies so that hopefully there will
be a chance of KDE adopting it in the future. Now that we've finally
gotten the release out the door, I plan to track KDE svn and write
scripts for KDE4 apps. Ideally, we'll have KDE4 support before KDE4 is
actually released.

(I know that there's a tool from KDAB which allows one to automate
KDE apps, but it's not Open Source and it only works with KDE; dogtail
supports anything that we can see through AT-SPI, which includes
OpenOffice.org and Mozilla-based applications as well as, hopefully,
KDE4.)

Fab: NetworkManager actually has a pretty well-designed separation
between the front-end and the back-end; the only problem stalling us
from being able to do cool things with it right now is that we have no
working DBUS bindings for KDE3 (so nobody can easily write a Kicker
applet to interface with NetworkManager to use on their desktop
today), and KDE4 doesn't actually have anything usable at this
point, whatsoever.

I brought this up at aKademy - aseigo and I were basically ready to go
ahead with it but we got sidetracked with window icon previews in the
window list on the desktop pager hover tooltip. (Try saying that five
times fast.)

In theory, somebody could write the applet using the DBUS API from C,
but the current Qt bindings in the DBUS tree are pretty much worthless,
so it's not going to be pretty either way.